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Inauguration 2013: Obama official swearing-in

On Sunday, Roberts read the oath from a piece of paper — and both men seemed relieved when it was over. They exchanged congratulations and thanks, and then Obama turned to his daughter Sasha. “I did it,” he told her. “You didn’t mess up,” she replied.

The historical fates of Obama and Roberts are more intertwined than those of any chief justice and president in recent decades. For much of Obama’s first four years in office, the pair seemed to be at loggerheads — particularly after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision upheld corporations’ right to spend money on elections. Obama trashed the ruling at his State of the Union Address with Roberts and six other justices sitting right in front of him.

The tension lifted briefly and dramatically last June, when Roberts joined with Democrats on the court to uphold a pivotal part of Obama’s signature health care reform law, the individual mandate. But experts predict the Roberts-led court will continue to challenge the president’s policies in areas that will shape the future of the nation, including affirmative action, immigration and the environment.

And that means the two men, each with a keen sense of his place in history, are likely to clash again during Obama’s second term.

“When you have a president and a chief justice of distinctly opposing philosophies, that’s a recipe for conflict, and it has been one, and it will be one,” said Jeffrey Toobin, an author of several books on the court and a legal analyst for CNN. “I don’t think there has been a level of ideological conflict between the president and the chief justice like this since the ’30s.”

Other analysts say it’s still too early to say whether the Obama-Roberts rivalry is destined for the history books.

“The Obama and Roberts differences are real and meaningful and will probably find expression in a number of other important cases over the next four years,” said Jeff Shesol, author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court.” “Whether it rises to the level of other kinds of presidential-judicial rivalries is something we’ll probably have to judge in retrospect.”

Obama and Roberts’s relationship got off to a famously rocky start during the 2009 Inauguration, when Obama jumped in prematurely to recite the oath and the chief justice then mangled the wording. Both men reportedly apologized for the episode, which Roberts may have exacerbated by trying to recite the oath by memory. The White House summoned him to the Map Room for a do-over the next day, just to make sure Obama was officially the president.

The first big flash point came about a year later, when the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision. Obama immediately denounced it as “a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics” and “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”